Nice weekend weather on tap

Staff reports

Published 7:31 am, Friday, March 1, 2013

There are "pop up'' showers in the forecast for Saturday night and Sunday, presumably leading to some pop-up umbrellas, but other than that, the weekend is shaping up to be mild.

Adding to the feeling of soft Irish mist that will coat the area there is also the reemergence of green as the last, hard-packed dirty snow from last month's blizzard melts away.

Daytime high temperatures are expected to reach into the mid-40s through next week, according to Erika Martin, a forecaster on WXEdge.com "There are increasing clouds and the chance of pop-up showers on Sunday as the system we've been tracking may retreat backward over the weekend,'' she said.

Today's highs across the region are expected to reajh into the 40s, under partly cloudy skies. There is no snow in the eight-day forecast, meteorologist Gil Simmons said.

Kevin Arnone of Milford, an intern in the WTNH weather center, prepared charts of the snow depth in Bridgeport on February 28 for the past five years. His charts, at http://tinyurl.com/cd4rk3c show that the grass was showing on that date in three of those years along the shore.

And 2013 is one of them despite the 30-plus inches, nearly a season's worth of snow, that was dumped on us on Feb. 8-9. Arnone's chart's show that in 2010 and 2011, when several significant storms were spaced out over the season, the western Connecticut coast had a snow depth of between 4 and 10 inches.

At the end of February in the mild winters of 2009 and 2012 the only snow cover that remained was in the Litchfield hills.

But that doesn't mean that we're out of the woods, snow-wise, this year. Significant snowstorms can and do happen in March, including the Great Blizzard of 1888. That storm, still the region's worst, began on March 12.